Althusser’s main claim to our attention is based on his attempt to establish a rapproachement between Marxism and structuralism. Since structuralism can be regarded as nothing more than a word for scientific method, we can best begin to grasp its meaning by contrasting it to the…| redsails.org
All philosophy that has existed so far was born of and is an expression of the intimate contradictions of society. However, no one philosophical system by itself can be taken to be the conscious expression of these contradictions — this expression can only be given by the…| redsails.org
The most famous statement Marx made on teleology was ostensibly against it. In addressing Lassalle on the importance of Darwin, he noted| redsails.org
Modern monetary theory (MMT) has become the flavour of the time in many leftist circles in recent years. The left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is apparently a supporter; Bernie Sanders’ former economic adviser Stephanie Kelton is a leading exponent and populariser of…| Red Sails
How should you be? You should be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds. It stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, “How unlucky that this should happen to me.” But not at all. Perhaps say instead…| Red Sails
In 1818, in the middle of the Restoration and just at that time when the collapse of the French Revolution seemed obvious to all, some of those who had initially welcomed the events of 1789 now placed them at arms length; for them it had become a colossal misunderstanding or…| redsails.org
Gene Sharp is popularly understood to be a kind of social movement hero. He is this intellectual giant that specifically wrote, prolifically, on the question of non-violent actions; the question of how non-violent tactics and strategy are sort of uniquely equipped — moreso than…| redsails.org
Most of what we hear about Tiananmen in 1989 focuses on student activists, since they dominated Tiananmen square itself and waved banners demanding “freedom and democracy.” However, the real history of the protests is a bit more complex.| redsails.org
There is no doubt about it: the guiding thread of Nietzsche’s thought is the condemnation of revolution at the political, philosophical, and epistemological level.| redsails.org
We already know, and it is a waste of air to keep pointing out, that everything coming out of the mouths of the venture capital freaks of the Silicon Valley and the LinkedIn influencers is a nightmarish sludge of inane nonsense. It’s a mix of blind tech enthusiasm (“This tech…| redsails.org
I believe that today, in this occasion, celebrating an act of such revolutionary significance as this one, in which the Ministry of Industries exhibits sincere pride at having always been at the forefront of deepening of revolutionary consciousness through collective work of a…| Red Sails
The relationship of Hitler’s fascists to Hegel’s philosophy is basically very simple: they resolutely reject it. Alfred Rosenberg, the main Nazi theorist, sees in the connection between Hegel and Marx an essential reason to define the Hegelian philosophy as hostile to the…| Red Sails
The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organizations implies universal and full freedom to criticize, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.| Red Sails
Is it possible for a movement to sustain itself without having a notion of its end goal? Bernstein’s principle, that “The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing,” though it claims to be an “orthodox” interpretation of dialectics, belies a purely mechanistic conception…| Red Sails
Gadamer accepts that Hegel acknowledges a connection between thought and language. But he believes that for Hegel language is nothing more than “a self-effacing and temporary medium of thought or merely its casing.” For Gadamer himself, by contrast, language is the permanent…| Red Sails
From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon these conditions only when they forced themselves…| Red Sails
There is this weird cult I’ve encountered quite a few times now, of people who associate themselves with a politician named Lyndon LaRouche. Many media outlets describe them as “far-right,” but LaRouchites, as I will call them, themselves decry this label, insisting they are not…| Red Sails
The so-called “green” peasant rebellions against the Bolsheviks immediately after the revolution in Russia are of some contemporary interest not only within Soviet studies, but also for students of rural revolt in the Third World. This is the case both because the green movements…| Red Sails
Before Marx, materialism examined the problem of knowledge apart from the social nature of man and apart from his historical development, and was therefore incapable of understanding the dependence of knowledge on social practice, that is, the dependence of knowledge on…| Red Sails
Of course, illusions and false ideas must be criticised and rejected as false and illusory. But one understands very little of religion and dreams if all that one knows of them is that they are false. The realist theories of knowledge that I have been criticising go no further than this. The dialectical materialist theory, however, seeks to understand these false ideas as reflections of reality.| Red Sails
I am very pleased to find you so resolute, and to see your thoughts turning away from the past and towards a new enterprise. To Paris, then! That ancient bastion of philosophy — absit omen! [May this be no ill omen!] — and the modern capital of the modern world. Whatever…| Red Sails
To judge the whole philosophical past as madness and folly is not only an anti-historical error, since it contains the anachronistic presumption that in the past they should have thought like today, but it is a truly genuine holdover from metaphysics, since it supposes a dogmatic…| Red Sails
Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.| Red Sails
I am writing this to say my last goodbye to you. I write this as one who lives in this world, but by the time you read this, I would have become a shade in the underworld. Ink and tears flow in equal measure as I write. Time and again I have had to put my pen away, unable to…| Red Sails
My name is Esperanza and I am a socialist, a feminist, a transgender Latina woman, and a survivor of the sex trade. I am writing to you as comrades in the struggle for socialism and as sisters who have presumably shared the experience of being prostitutes. I prefer the term…| Red Sails
The Melians are a colony from Sparta. They had refused to join the Athenian empire like the other islanders, and at first had remained neutral without helping either side; but afterwards, when the Athenians had brought force to bear on them by laying waste their land, they had…| Red Sails
The first version of this article was written after the first three months of being back in China after too long away. The version written then contained many immediate impressions and experiences, which I interpreted on the basis of extensive earlier research. There is an…| Red Sails
What is the significance of the life and teaching of Mahatma Gandhi? Is the story of his life “the story of his experiments with truth,” as he himself put it in the 1920s when he started writing his autobiography?| Red Sails
According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, or to attacks upon his honor and reputation.” And further, “Everyone has the right to the protection of the…| Red Sails
In 1867 there appeared in Hamburg Capital, a Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume I, Marx’s chief work, which expounds the foundations of his economic socialist conceptions and the main features of his criticism of existing society, the capitalist mode of…| Red Sails
What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, “shamefaced” materialism? The agnostic’s conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from…| Red Sails
The Trotsky-Stalin struggle is not one between two different personalities. It’s a struggle between two different principles of legitimizing power.| Red Sails
Gramsci distinguishes between, on the one hand, a dogmatic communism and, on the other, a “critical communism” that presents itself as heir of the highest summits of the bourgeois cultural tradition, parting from Hegel and classical German philosophy.| Red Sails
Over the weekend of November 30th, more than twenty revolutionary organizations from across the United States came together in Colorado Springs to unite under the banner of the Marxist Center. This put a new layer of formality onto what has been until now an informal, if still…| Red Sails
“Workers must seize the means of production!” Yes. But what does this mean in practice?| redsails.org
Why was Rakhmetov was introduced, if now he’s gone and will no longer appear in my story? Was it really necessary to introduce a special character so that he could express his opinion of the others?| Red Sails
What is history? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superfluous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarnations of the Cambridge Modern History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to the Syndics of the…| Red Sails
Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions. His human worth and reality depend on this…| Red Sails
This article seeks to articulate an interpretation of Fanon’s engagement with G. W. F. Hegel that does not either assume that Fanon rejects Hegel’s normative conclusions or that Fanon’s engagement is incidental to his larger philosophical projects. I argue that Fanon’s take on…| Red Sails
What can be more comical than fighting “kulaks, usurers, parasites and sharks” by perfecting the “rules” of credit banks? Usury in its worst forms is most tenacious in our rural districts, and is so precisely because of the exclusiveness of the estate system there…| Red Sails
The cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production is the fact that our present social order enables the capitalists to buy the labour power of the worker at its value, but to extract from it much more than its value, by making the worker work longer than is necessary in order…| redsails.org
In the decade after the war Freud’s theories dominated the narrow circles of British intellectuals. His psychoanalysis was accepted warmly for many reasons. It was new and exciting, it was shocking, it debunked religion and morals, it promised an internal liberation from all…| Red Sails
My effort to address the comments made by the two distinguished scholars (to “negate their negations” as it were), consists of three steps. I will start with a brief resume of Hegel’s dialectical logic, to provide a scaffold for the debate. Subsequently, I will address the…| Red Sails
If Engels had not been the constant companion in arms of Marx in the revolutionary struggles of the 19th century, there is no doubt that he would be remembered chiefly as one of the foremost scientist-philosophers of the century. It was an ironical tribute paid to the correctness…| Red Sails
For nearly 30 years, George Meany, a New York Irish Catholic plumber, who rose to be the undisputed leader of the American labor movement, collaborated with Jay Lovestone, a Lithuanian-born Jew, who was secretary general of the American Communist Party from 1927 to 1929, until he…| redsails.org
Before the Fourth Congress the bourgeois formula “race question” found general acceptance in the Party as a definition of the Negro question in the United States. The fact that no one questioned the correctness of this formula was itself indicative of the passivity and general…| Red Sails
Nietzsche’s left-wing advocates often brush away any criticism of the philosopher’s judeophobic and pro-eugenics views with the explanation that his work was corrupted by his sister. The charge goes something like this: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a fascist-sympathizer who…| Red Sails
Deputy Surkov’s speech in the Duma during the debate on the Synod estimates, and the discussion that arose within our Duma group when it considered the draft of this speech (both printed in this issue) have raised a question which is of extreme importance and urgency at this…| Red Sails
Professor David Harvey (DH), the human geographer, is probably the most eminent Marxist scholar alive today with a host of books, papers and educational videos to his name on Marxist economic theory. In April 2018, he circulated a short paper expressing succinctly his view of…| Red Sails
It’s 200 years today since Karl Marx was born. And it’s just over 100 years since the great 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes wrote about Marx’s contribution. Keynes wrote then: “how can I accept the (Communist) doctrine which sets up as its bible above and beyond…| Red Sails
At the “World Conference against Racism” in Durban, South Africa, three thousand non-governmental organizations from all over the world fiercely condemned Israel for its national oppression and racial discrimination of Palestinians — its brutal military repression did not fall…| Red Sails
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.| Red Sails
The problem of recognition in transitional states is the difficulty of assigning to a definite set an object that possesses some of the features of two mutually exclusive ones, and the harms attendant on failing to do so. Socialism is not capitalism; hence capitalist traits are…| Red Sails
This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the “man”-made boundaries of gender.| Red Sails
Was Lenin, as the standard interpretations would have it, a sectarian who sought to destroy all who disagreed with him? Or did he also display ecumenist tendencies alongside, or in tension with, his sectarian bent? Is there perhaps a deeper relation between sectarianism and…| Red Sails
Are intellectuals an autonomous and independent social class or does every social class have its own specialized category of intellectuals? The problem is complex because of the various forms taken by the real historical process of the formation of different categories of…| Red Sails
Alarmist narratives about online misinformation continue to gain traction despite evidence that its prevalence and impact are overstated. Drawing on research examining the use of big data in social science and reception studies, we identify six misconceptions about misinformation…| Red Sails
History shows that if at different times men were imbued with different ideas and desires, the reason for this is that at different times men fought nature in different ways to satisfy their needs and, accordingly, their economic relations assumed different forms.| Red Sails
Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. It is impossible to emphasize this thought too much at a time when along with the fashionable preaching of opportunism people are carried away with the narrowest possible forms of practical activity.| redsails.org
I have few personal recollections of Georgii Valentinovich. Our meetings were infrequent, although they were not devoid of significance, and I gladly record my memories of him.| Red Sails
Let’s discuss Nietzsche’s explicit hatred of the syllogism and its enduring relevance to reactionary politics more generally. According to him, “the knife-thrust of the syllogism” is how “Greek taste undergoes a change in favour of dialectics,” how “the rabble gets on top.” “That…| Red Sails
Your “theory” is certainly much loftier than that of Mao Zedong; yours is high in the sky, while his is down-to-earth. But admirable as is such loftiness, it will unfortunately be just the thing welcomed by the Japanese aggressors. Hence I fear that it will drop down from the sky, and when it does it may land on the filthiest place on earth.| Red Sails
Will you believe in the gods or in the Peasant Association?| Red Sails
The dialectical moment is when definite concepts supersede themselves and transition into their opposites. But, especially in philosophy, if the dialectical principle is applied outside of the context of complete understanding, it becomes skepticism, and the…| Red Sails
Materialists have been criticising Kant from a standpoint diametrically opposite to that from which Mach and Avenarius criticise him.| Red Sails
All possible brands of Kantianism form the main bulwark in the struggle against materialism; it is the philosophical spiritual weapon employed by bourgeois reaction in the ideological sphere. In the field of social science, Kantianism is utilised for this purpose as a dualist…| Red Sails
The extraordinary wealth and density of historical, philosophical, and political trees that thicken the 1000 pages of Domenico Losurdo’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel (hereafter Nietzsche) make the task of any reviewer of the book extremely difficult.| Red Sails
Sixty years ago, on November 14, 1831, died a man who will indisputably and always occupy one of the very first places in the history of thought. Not one of the sciences which the French call “sciences morales et politiques” has remained unaffected by the powerful and…| Red Sails
Our Party has established the theoretical school for cadres to raise the level of their understanding in order to meet the requirements of its revolutionary tasks.| Red Sails
In Italy, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, situating himself within the tradition started by Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti developed an indictment against Hegel, and specifically against those elements of Hegelian philosophy that were, deliberately or not, embedded within…| Red Sails
In the first few weeks of 2024, amid intensifying news of world war and a flare-up of the global pandemic, I made the strange decision to focus on readying for publication three short fiction stories. On some level this is just because of my mood. However, I also chose the three…| Red Sails
Answerer was built to last as long as was necessary — which was quite long, as some races judge time, and not long at all, according to others. But to Answerer, it was just long enough.| Red Sails
It can be difficult to foresee the twists and turns through which fortune brings ruin and ruin brings fortune. There once was a man, skilled in divination, who lived close to the Northern frontier with his son. One day for no reason, the son’s horse ran away to the nomads across…| Red Sails
The kings of steel, of petroleum, and all the other kings of the United States have always in a high degree excited my power of imagination. It seemed to me certain that these people who possess so much money could not be like other mortals.| Red Sails
The history of the Communist movement is full of intrigue, espionage, and infiltration. One of my go-to examples is from the United States, where in the 1960s an already-weak movement was divided and browbeaten by FBI agents pretending to be ultra-principled, far-left agitators:| redsails.org
Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.| Red Sails
Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation. Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race…| Red Sails
The transformation problem has provoked controversy within Marxism and derision from without for more than a century. Bourgeois economists in particular (beginning with Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, and continuing, most notoriously, with Paul Samuelson) have seized on it to argue for…| Red Sails
As of March 2018 Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist who typically covers El Chapo and ISIS, can add to his list of accolades a nomination for a James Beard award, given for excellence in culinary writing. What’s a writer who used to work for the Department of Defense doing…| Red Sails
Religion is a historical phenomenon pertaining to a definite period in the development of human society. It has its own cycle of emergence, development, and demise. Religious faith and religious sentiment, along with religious ceremonies and organizations consonant with this…| Red Sails
The comrade who first introduced me to Ilyich told me that he was a man of scientific bent, that he read scientific books exclusively, that he had never read a novel and never read poetry. This surprised me. I myself in my youth had read all the classics; I knew practically the…| Red Sails
The widespread prejudice that philosophy is something very difficult because it is the intellectual activity of a specific category of specialist scholars or professional and systematic philosophers must be destroyed. To do this we must first show that all men are “philosophers,”…| Red Sails
“If the capitalist is the owner of the capital on which he operates, he pockets the whole surplus-value. It is absolutely immaterial to the labourer whether the capitalist does this, or whether he has to pay a part of it to a third person as its legal proprietor.”| Red Sails
The training schedule was exacting, but occasionally left us time for a little fun. We were “entertaining” a group of foreign students and trying to lead a Bedouin kind of life in order to politicise our Bedouin population. The students had been attending an international…| Red Sails
Interviewer: Over lunch you said that around the time of Para and afterward with The Battle of Algiers you felt that colonialism was a most urgent theme. What in particular made you feel that way?| Red Sails
The myth to be discussed here was given its purest expression by John Plamenatz when he asserted that “Marx often called ideology ‘false consciousness’.” Not surprisingly, Plamenatz cites no instances of this usage, as, in truth, Marx never calls ideology “false consciousness.”…| Red Sails
Lenin very rarely mentioned Africa in his writings on colonialism, but inferences about Africa can be drawn from Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and other works. Most bourgeois writers on the partition of Africa make snide remarks on the Leninist explanation…| Red Sails
If we consider how freedom comes into being, this is nothing other than the phenomenon of history. Although freedom as such is primarily an abstraction, the means by which it comes into being are concrete, and present themselves before our eyes in the form of history.| Red Sails
No one can remain calm in the face of imperialist bombs and lies.| Red Sails
Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt. There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights as they are being demanded in South Africa.| Red Sails
“Gaddafi’s death is a historic turning point!” proclaim the chorus of leaders of NATO and the West, who do not even take the trouble to put distance between themselves and the barbaric assassination of the Libyan leader or the lies deployed to that end by the leaders of the…| Red Sails
Some people understand being in favour of something as a kind of thought act: it happens in one fell swoop in the realm of intentions, and it can be verified by a simple declaration of support. It is enough for me to declare I’m in favour of, for example, abolishing the…| Red Sails
One problem continues to afflict every socialist who feels in themselves the historical responsibility that falls upon the working class and upon the Party whose mission is to represent the critical and functional consciousness of this class.| Red Sails
Michael Hudson argues that the industrial capitalism of a previous era has given way to a new form of financial capitalism. Today’s financial capitalists, unlike capitalists in Marx’s day, now claim their share of the surplus by passively extracting interest or economic rents…| Red Sails
One cannot overstate the wisdom of that phrase attributed to Georges Clemenceau: War is too serious a business to be left to the generals! Even in his acute chauvinism and anticommunism, the French prime minister maintained a fairly lucid awareness of the fact that specialists…| redsails.org
There’s a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.| Red Sails
You ask me, my young comrade, what role does proletarian ideology give to “love”? Perhaps you are concerned that labour youth are presently “more preoccupied with love and all sorts of related questions” than with the larger tasks facing the workers’ state. If so (it is difficult…| Red Sails
“Dogmatism,” “doctrinairism,” “ossification of the party — the inevitable retribution that follows the violent strait-lacing of thought” — these are the enemies against which the knightly champions of “freedom of criticism” in Rabocheye Dyelo rise up in arms. We are very…| Red Sails
The root evil in the United States is slavery. The party seeking the abolition of chattel slavery has its stronghold in the states of New England. These states demand protective tariffs. It may very well be that they are mistaken about this, that they don’t in fact need…| Red Sails